A trip to deliver a pair of love birds turns into a nightmare for the Brenner family and a guest by the name of Melanie Davis. In the scenic town of Bodega Bay, where the Brenner's home is located flocks of birds have begun to attack and terrorizing all that reside in the small town. Can anyone survive the birds?

I know the premise for a movie about killer birds is kinda lame, but place the tale into the hands of Alfred Hitchcock and you get something altogether different. The Birds is slow to start out and the story line is somewhat jumbled as Melanie appears to be following an old boyfriend of hers for some reason. She follows him home to deliver the love birds, but is forced to stay with Mitch Brenner and his wife and strange mother, when for some unknown reason birds begin to attack people.

Now the effects are not great and there is not a lot of blood, but the tension is high at times. I cannot tell you how much your heart begins to race when you see the children playing in the school yard and you also get to watch the birds piling up on the jungle gym. Not only is this a classic horror scene, but also a classic movie scene. This may be one of Hitchcock's fidelity tales that he seems to work into most of his films, as there always seems to be a vixen on the loose in a Hitchcock flick.

For what it is The Birds works well, in fact for what there really is to work with, the film works very well in building suspense and dread and nearly every other aspect of the film itself, the only flaw is it does tend to feel it's age after your initial viewing.

5/10

The Birds. What a great film. Hitchcock at his best. Hitchcock's films have a lot of quiet, slow time, but I believe that this time is all necessary for build up. That's just how his films get you.

The scene in where Melanie Daniels sits on a bench at the school playground, having a long smoke, makes me want to reach into the television, grab her by the ears and say "Look behind you!" I also personally love the scene where the children are running from the birds and are getting attacked... a bite to the ear here, a nip to the calf there... don't worry, I don't hate kids, I just love that scene. They're all so helpless, running and falling, getting pecked and picked at by seagulls. It's a chilling scene.

But not quite as chilling as the scene that Jessica Tandy finds waiting for her in the back bedroom of a farmhouse. She does such an amazing job of showing the shock and terror, the poor woman drops her purse, runs outside and attempts to "throw up" some kind of words, but nothing comes.

Now, the one scene the irks me is the scene where Tippi Hedren goes into the upper bedroom and gets attacked by the birds, if she would have stopped flailing like an idiot and just opened the damn door, she wouldn't be all scarred and bloody in that famous green dress of hers. But, alas, some questionable movie moments are meant to make great ones.

This has always been one of my favorites, but I have to be doing nothing and really in the mood to watch this one. Give it your full attention, and let it run its course, you'll appreciate it.

I just got finished watching this for the first time. I am a fan of Alfred Hitchcock and firmly believe that he had a penchant for scaring people. In fact, his ability to scare people died with him. Nobody else can ever do the things that he did with terror.

With The Birds I was a bit disappointed. Maybe I was expecting too much, which seems to happen sometimes, but it wasn't as scary as I was hoping for.

Don't get me wrong, I think the movie is very well done and the camera angles are very effective. I can see how the movie can be scary, and when I was watching this, my son was watching it as well. He was only scared at one part - when the dead guy had no eyes. Hopefully he'll forget about it.

Upon watching this movie, I see how this movie influences some of the greatest zombie movies ever made. Watch it again, and in key parts, replace the birds with zombies. Trust me, it works.

All in all, I wouldn't consider it a masterpiece, but I would say that it's worth watching. You can see that it's dated, and it doesn't lose that unfortunately. That's why I'm giving this 5 out of 10 unbelievable annoying songs sung by schoolchildren.